As portable electronic devices become more compact, and the number of functions performed by a given device increases, it has become a significant challenge to design a user interface that allows users to easily interact with a multifunction device. This challenge is particularly significant for handheld portable devices, which have much smaller screens than desktop or laptop computers. This situation is unfortunate because the user interface is the gateway through which users receive not only content but also responses to user actions or behaviors, including user attempts to access a device's features, tools, and functions. Some portable communication devices (e.g., mobile telephones, sometimes called mobile phones, cell phones, cellular telephones, and the like) have resorted to adding more pushbuttons, increasing the density of push buttons, overloading the functions of pushbuttons, or using complex menu systems to allow a user to access, store and manipulate data. These conventional user interfaces often result in complicated key sequences and menu hierarchies that must be memorized by the user.
Many conventional user interfaces, such as those that include physical pushbuttons, are also inflexible. This may prevent a user interface from being configured and/or adapted by either an application running on the portable device or by users. When coupled with the time consuming requirement to memorize multiple key sequences and menu hierarchies, and the difficulty in activating a desired pushbutton, such inflexibility is frustrating to most users.
In particular, many conventional user interfaces for displaying, organizing, managing, and creating emails on a portable communication device are inflexible. The combination of small screens for displaying emails and email lists, complicated pushbutton key sequences, and complex menu hierarchies results in email user interfaces that are not user-friendly. As a result, using an email client on a portable communication device can be frustrating.
In addition, many users of portable communication devices have multiple email accounts that they want to access on their devices. However, given the small displays and cramped user interfaces of many such devices it is often unwieldy to switch between those different accounts. Also, it is possible that sending email from a particular email account is not possible when a user is connected to an email server associated with a different email account. Finally, in addition to using email for text communications, many users also send digital media files (e.g., photos) via email. It is often difficult for a user to interact with such digital media files from within an email application provided by the portable device.
Accordingly, there is a need for portable multifunction devices with more transparent and intuitive user interfaces for displaying, organizing, managing, and creating emails that are easy to use, configure, and/or adapt. There is also a need for portable multifunction devices that provide convenient access to multiple email accounts and digital media content that is associated with emails.